Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a dreamy, drifting film, as befits the state of mind of its protagonists. The characters played by Bill Murray (in what I am tempted to call his best performance ever, building on but transcending his role in Rushmore) and Scarlett Johanson are far apart in age, but they are both Americans adrift in Tokyo, not understanding the language or many aspects of the culture, insomniac from jet lag, semi-estranged from their spouses, not having much to do, and essentially alone, even in the midst of company. My friend Billy writes aptly in his blog of the movie’s “strange and lucid and indifferent spell” (actually, I am not sure if he means the spell of the movie, the spell of jet lag and insomnia, or the spell of sublimated sexual desire; but I suppose all three are accurate). The movie has no real direction, it doesn’t really build to anything like a climax: Murray and Johansen meet, spend time together, are tender with one another, don’t have sex, and then separate again. Indeed, the movie suggests – as William Gibson does in a very different way in Pattern Recognition – that jet lag is the quintessential postmodern condition, and it makes a strange and beautiful poetry of the consequent dislocation of its protagonists. Lost in Translation is lyrical without being sappy; and it conveys a sense of the alienness (from an American point of view) of Japan, without turning this into the usual essentializing, orientalizing portrait of the Mysterious Other (something of which even Gibson is perhaps guilty). For there is no exoticism here. Exoticism requires a grounding sense of familiarity and being-at-home in order to emphasize the difference of the Other; but here that reference to being-at-home is precisely what gets dissolved. The Situationists celebrated urban drift, or what they called derive, as a form of exploration, as a radical reconfiguration of the real by means of defamiliarization. But Lost in Translation presents a blank, neutral, oddly impersonal form of derive, in comparison to which the Situationist project seems merely a wishful idealization. When I say blank and neutral, I don’t mean anomie or alienation, but an ontologically primary condition, deeper than either grounding or estrangement. And I don’t mean affectlessness, but rather a kind of impersonal intensity, in which things are distant, and yet that very distance is powerfully present and powerfully affecting (I think this is part of what Billy means by “lucid”). Lost in Translation is both funny and sad, at times, but its lyricism is too precise, and too wryly observant, to be characterized as either nostalgic or wistful. The film has the force of a revelation, even though (or maybe precisely because) it is telling us that there is nothing to be revealed.

Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a dreamy, drifting film, as befits the state of mind of its protagonists. The characters played by Bill Murray (in what I am tempted to call his best performance ever, building on but transcending his role in Rushmore) and Scarlett Johanson are far apart in age, but they are both Americans adrift in Tokyo, not understanding the language or many aspects of the culture, insomniac from jet lag, semi-estranged from their spouses, not having much to do, and essentially alone, even in the midst of company. My friend Billy writes aptly in his blog of the movie’s “strange and lucid and indifferent spell” (actually, I am not sure if he means the spell of the movie, the spell of jet lag and insomnia, or the spell of sublimated sexual desire; but I suppose all three are accurate). The movie has no real direction, it doesn’t really build to anything like a climax: Murray and Johansen meet, spend time together, are tender with one another, don’t have sex, and then separate again. Indeed, the movie suggests – as William Gibson does in a very different way in Pattern Recognition – that jet lag is the quintessential postmodern condition, and it makes a strange and beautiful poetry of the consequent dislocation of its protagonists. Lost in Translation is lyrical without being sappy; and it conveys a sense of the alienness (from an American point of view) of Japan, without turning this into the usual essentializing, orientalizing portrait of the Mysterious Other (something of which even Gibson is perhaps guilty). For there is no exoticism here. Exoticism requires a grounding sense of familiarity and being-at-home in order to emphasize the difference of the Other; but here that reference to being-at-home is precisely what gets dissolved. The Situationists celebrated urban drift, or what they called derive, as a form of exploration, as a radical reconfiguration of the real by means of defamiliarization. But Lost in Translation presents a blank, neutral, oddly impersonal form of derive, in comparison to which the Situationist project seems merely a wishful idealization. When I say blank and neutral, I don’t mean anomie or alienation, but an ontologically primary condition, deeper than either grounding or estrangement. And I don’t mean affectlessness, but rather a kind of impersonal intensity, in which things are distant, and yet that very distance is powerfully present and powerfully affecting (I think this is part of what Billy means by “lucid”). Lost in Translation is both funny and sad, at times, but its lyricism is too precise, and too wryly observant, to be characterized as either nostalgic or wistful. The film has the force of a revelation, even though (or maybe precisely because) it is telling us that there is nothing to be revealed.
PS: soundtrack music to die for, by Kevin Shields (!!!)